His Domain Transformed, Parks Chief Is Leaving

Adrian Benepe, the New York City parks commissioner, was able to get a close-up view of a Eurasian Eagle Owl in 2004.Credit
James Estrin/The New York Times

He got his start as a teenager cleaning locker rooms at a city pool in the East Village and picking up litter in East River Park, and ended up overseeing the most ambitious program of building and refurbishing New York City’s parks since the era of Robert Moses. Now, after a decade on the job, the parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe, 55, is stepping down to take a position with a national conservation group.

Mr. Benepe was 16 when he first worked for the Department of Parks and Recreation as a seasonal employee while still in high school. That was in summer 1973, “when things were at a very low ebb,” he said, referring to the poor condition of the city’s parks.

“It was a very dispiriting introduction,” he continued.

Still, several years later, fresh out of Middlebury College, he took a job as an urban park ranger in Central Park, on the eve of the gradual but complete transformation of the city’s flagship park. Over the next three decades, with some minor interruptions, Mr. Benepe climbed the ranks of the department, heading up communications, natural resources, art and antiquities and eventually becoming the Manhattan borough commissioner.

After Labor Day, Mr. Benepe will leave the parks department to take on a newly created position focusing on urban park development at the Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit group based in San Francisco. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg made the announcement at Soundview Park in the Bronx, where officials broke ground on more than $15 million in improvements, including a new track and field, playground, sports court and amphitheater.

Mr. Bloomberg said he was appointing Veronica M. White, the executive director of the city’s Center for Economic Opportunity, a laboratory for some of the mayor’s antipoverty initiatives, to succeed Mr. Benepe.

Named commissioner in 2002, Mr. Benepe was one of Mr. Bloomberg’s original appointees and directed the department of 7,000 employees at a time of remarkable expansion and improvement of city parks. Aided by a strong economy for most of his tenure, as well as the mayor’s own personal interest in public spaces, Commissioner Benepe presided over public-private partnerships that breathed life into several signature parks that are still works in progress, including the High Line and Brooklyn Bridge Park.

Other, less flashy spaces also reaped the benefits of the giant capital budget that the Bloomberg administration devoted to creating new parks — 730 acres-worth to date — and refurbishing existing ones. Of $4.5 billion budgeted for that purpose, $3 billion has already been spent.

“Some of the building under Adrian’s tenure is nothing short of the time of Robert Moses,” said Douglas Blonsky, president of the Central Park Conservancy, the nonprofit group that manages that park for the city. “I think people don’t realize that over the last 12 years we’ve seen new parks sprout up, and it’s continuing. He’s a real park professional.”

Mr. Bloomberg said Mr. Benepe did “extraordinary work as parks commissioner, leading transformative changes in every corner of New York City.”

Photo

Mr. Benepe is seen, at right in the second row, with the 1979 class of the Urban Park Rangers.Credit
New York City Parks Department

At the Trust for Public Land, Mr. Benepe will promote the public-private partnership model, an environmentally minded infrastructure and wider access to parks to cities across the country.

Ms. White’s work at the economic opportunity center has followed the same mold. Mr. Bloomberg praised her record of “exploring innovative partnerships and attracting private funds,” skills that should serve her well as parks commissioner.

Mr. Benepe’s two brief detours from the city’s park system were both with like-minded organizations. For three years, he worked at the New York Botanical Garden and, with a colleague, hatched the idea for a winter railway show that became an annual holiday tradition for thousands of families. Later, at the Municipal Art Society, he began a popular exhibition aimed at children, called Kid City.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

With two grown children, Mr. Benepe cited his interactions with young people, along with the chance to spend time outdoors, as one of the most appealing parts of his position. “This job in particular is about the happy aspect of people’s lives,” he said.

Yet Mr. Benepe was not without critics. Some people objected to his turning to private sources for the money to pay for park maintenance, like the plan for upscale housing to underwrite Brooklyn Bridge Park and the twice-yearly fashion shows that take over Damrosch Park next to Lincoln Center.

Mr. Benepe also clashed with vendors and artists over the city’s efforts to rein in commerce in parks. And there have been complaints that the upkeep of the city’s many existing parks has been sacrificed for lavish expenditures on a few new gems.

“We’re classic victims of our own success,” said Holly M. Leicht, executive director of New Yorkers for Parks, an advocacy group. “All the attention paid to the beautiful new parks has created a certain complacency about the state of the existing parks. There’s a disconnect between the capital investments and the depletion of the maintenance budgets.”

Still, Ms. Leicht lauded what she called the innovative funding structures, especially for waterfront parks where piers are constantly eroded by marine organisms and wave action. “If we want new parkland, we do need to think creatively and this administration, with Adrian Benepe as commissioner, has been willing to push the envelope on some of those alternate financing mechanisms,” she said. “That’s the wave of the future.”

Mr. Benepe said New York had become a city known for its parks, in part because of large networks of volunteers and in part because of philanthropy — some $165 million raised privately each year through several nonprofit groups, including Friends of the High Line, the City Parks Foundation and the Central Park Conservancy.

“Generous philanthropists, committed volunteers and city largess — you put the three of those together and it becomes this very creative laboratory,” he said. “That itself is not replicable, but some of the lessons learned are replicable. What separates a great city from an O.K. city are great parks and public spaces.”

David W. Chen contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on June 19, 2012, on Page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: His Domain Transformed, Parks Chief Is Leaving. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe